Page 29Scan 7 of 10
has he promised to those journalists who have had the patience to attend, to complete their article. – Our excavations here have begun under the best conditions and in still favourable weather. We are exploring the large building which had just appeared at the limit of our 1961 excavations and its surroundings. It seems to be very vast, but its part its ruins are very dilapidated following a violent fire at the end of the 13th c. B.C. to which have been added the ancient and modern clandestine excavations as well as the destructive searches of the English and Swedish missions which preceded us on the site and whose misjudged the true nature (town instead of necropolis). Nevertheless the excavations are promising, for the calcination following the ancient fire has, in places, formed very hard agglomerates difficult to pierce and which ancient and modern researchers have gone around. It would however be necessary for us to be able to triple the surface surface to be investigated each season in order to obtain, on this extremely vast site already disturbed in many places, the results that we hope for: to find and clear the ruins that remained undamaged, the rare untouched tombs and the still mysterious deposit of the tablets in the enigmatic Cypro-
65 figures hard to readstruck struck outadded written in above” jug ditto, and what it repeatsword reading not certain